Chomsky: INTELLECTUALS AND THE STATE (1977)

(...) In the United States, the prevailing version of the "white man's burden" has been the doctrine, carefully nurtured by the intelligentsia, that the United States, alone among the powers of modern history, is not guided in its international affairs by the perceived material interests of those with domestic power, but rather wanders aimlessly, merely reacting to the initiatives of others, while pursuing abstract moral principles: the Wilsonian principles of freedom and self-determination, democracy, equality, and so on. Responsible controversy proceeds within a narrow spectrum: At one extreme, there are those who laud the United States for its unique benevolence; at the other, we find the "realist" critics — George Kennan and Hans Morgenthau, for example — who deplore the foolishness of American policy and believe that we should not be so obsessively moralistic but should pursue the national interest in a rational way.

The work of the realist critics gives the deepest insight into the dominant ideology and dramatically reveals the extent of its penetration. In the early 1960s, Hans Morgenthau — who was near the outer limits of responsible criticism and, to his credit, passed beyond them a few years later — could write that the United States his a "transcendent purpose," namely, "the establishment of equality in freedom in America," and indeed throughout the world, since "the arena within which the United States must defend and promote its purpose has become world-wide." "America has become the Rome and Athens of the Western world, the foundation of its lawful order and the fountainhead of its culture," though "America does not know this." 27

To be sure, Morgenthau recognizes certain defects both at home and abroad — in Central America and the Philippines, for example. But he chides those critics who rely on the ample historical record to deny the "transcendent purpose" of America and who claim that the United States is very much like every other power — what is often described (though not by Morgenthau) as a "radical critique," a revealing choice of words. Such critics, according to Morgenthau, are guilty of a simple error of logic: "To reason thus is to confound the abuse of reality with reality itself." It is the unachieved "national purpose," revealed by "the evidence of history as our minds reflect it," which is the reality; the actual historical record is merely the abuse of reality.

The theological overtones are apparent, and Morgenthau is not unaware of them. He remarks that the critics, who mistake the real world for reality, have fallen into "the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds." The comment is apt. There is indeed something truly religious in the fervor with which responsible American intellectuals have sought to deny plain fact and to secure their dogmas concerning American benevolence, the contemporary version of the "civilizing mission."

But the doctrines of the state religion were not able to survive the war in Vietnam, at least among large parts of the population. The result was an ideological crisis. The institutional foundations for the repeated counterrevolutionary intervention of the postwar years remained unshaken, but the doctrinal system that had served to gain popular support for the crusade against independent development had collapsed. The problem of the day has been to reconstruct it. It is a serious problem, since imperial intervention carries costs, both material and moral, which must be borne by the population. I would now like to survey some of the methods by which this problem is being faced by the secular priesthood. (...)

Media theory and its societal impact, the role of advertising... have gone unmentioned so far. He was just there when the media started evolving, and he commented on these developments as being fundamental to civilization, enabling regime-changes and revolutions on the one end, and an unfathomable "pop-corn" stupor on the other side of the material median.

 R_P wrote:


Granted - I put him on a pedestal - but I still do that with my very own eye. As layman, perhaps - although I gave academic lectures in informatics, back in Zero days.

 thisbody wrote:
His critiques of US foreign policy and media analysis are more valuable to lay people. Academic linguistics is another matter. Hotly debated in some areas. They do provide some insight into AI hype.

 Beaker wrote:


So, what exactly is it that you mean to have understood from the article you linked? Sorry, I have read it.
I did not read more than accusations of falseness which in the end of that puffed-up littany miss any further explainer.

 thisbody wrote:

Risible

 R_P wrote:
Yep. A lone caller and perhaps one of the smartest guys around for long and far (see: Chomsky Grammar) which made "possible" what we call "machine language" based on a Turing machine. So he systematized the way humans could talk to computers. Mind, all programming languages in existence are based on his grammar.

Historically speaking, Chomsky could be related to Panini, father of linguistics...  apart from figureheads living in legend and scriptures of mankind like Sri Vyasa (Vedas and Vedanta) living at a time when knowledge was delivered over generations through oral transmission for many thousand years... up to latest invention of scripture, while speech seemed to be more practical.

Noam Chomsky, 95, recovering in hospital in his wife’s native country of Brazil after stroke
The 95-year-old famed linguist has not been seen in public since June last year

 R_P wrote:
It is why it feels as ingrained as decades- or life-long truths to many of us yet alive, while we're dying out at the same time and people actually are believing that AI will change ANY FUCKING THING!!!!

Those who've lived through WW-II mostly have reached the eternal hunting grounds, meanwhile. The result can be viewed daily on the news sites we all visit:

Cultural decline on all ends!

I know it's hard to grasp for someone having been raised without any of it...

Their lies were apparent then, and they are now. It is just that we all can't help the groove or so it seems to me.

Dio mio no...

Necessary illusions (1989), Ch. 3 The Bounds of the Expressible, p. 72-73

One crucial doctrine, standard throughout history, is that the state is
adopting a defensive stance, resisting challenges to order and to its
noble principles. Thus, the United States is invariably resisting
aggression, sometimes “internal aggression.” Leading scholars assure us
that the war in Vietnam was “undertaken in defense of a free people
resisting communist aggression” as the United States attacked South
Vietnam in the early 1960s to defend the client dictatorship against the
South Vietnamese aggressors who were about to overthrow it; no
justification need be offered to establish such an obvious truth, and none
is. Some even refer blandly to “the Eisenhower administration’s strategy
of deterring aggression by threatening the use of nuclear weapons” in
Indochina in 1954, “where French forces found themselves facing
defeat” at Dienbienphu “at the hands of the Communist Viet Minh,” the
aggressors who attacked our French ally defending Indochina (from its
population).⁷ Cultivated opinion generally has internalized this stance.
Accordingly, it is a logical impossibility that one should oppose U.S.
aggression, a category that cannot exist. Whatever pretense they adopt,
the critics must be “partisans of Hanoi” or “apologists for Communism”
elsewhere, defending the “aggressors,” perhaps attempting to conceal
their “hidden agendas.”⁸
A related doctrine is that “the yearning to see American-style
democracy duplicated throughout the world has been a persistent theme
in American foreign policy,” as a New York Times diplomatic
correspondent proclaimed after the U.S.-backed military government
suppressed the Haitian elections by violence, widely predicted to be the
likely consequence of U.S. support for the junta. These sad events, he
observed, are “the latest reminder of the difficulty American policymakers
face in trying to work their will, no matter how benevolent, on
other nations.”⁹ These doctrines require no argument and resist
mountains of counter-evidence. On occasion, the pretense collapses
under its manifest absurdity. It is then permissible to recognize that we
were not always so benevolent and so profoundly dedicated to
democracy as we are today. The regular appeal to this convenient
technique of “change of course” over many years elicits not ridicule, but
odes to our unfailing benevolence, as we set forth on some new
campaign to “defend democracy.”

Plus ça change...

Noam Chomsky on Anarchism, Human Nature and Joe Biden
The legendary leftist intellectual also discusses his theory of the good life and more.

In fact, just as a rule of thumb, if anything is discussed as if it’s just obvious, we don’t have to talk about it, everyone agrees, but we know it’s complicated. In any such situation, we should be asking, what’s going on? Nothing complicated can have that degree of uniformity about it. So some scam is underway.

Noam Chomsky Believes Trump Is “the Worst Criminal in Human History”

Over the past four years, have we been in a strange and new period of American history? Or are we seeing a continuation of American history that is pretty much in line with what it has always been?
Of course, it’s the same country. We haven’t undergone a major revolution, but the last four years are very much out of line with the history of Western democracies altogether. By now, it’s becoming almost outlandish. In the three hundred and fifty years of parliamentary democracy, there’s been nothing like what we’re seeing now in Washington. I don’t have to tell you. You read the same newspapers I do. A President who has said if he doesn’t like the outcome of an election, he’ll simply not leave office, and is taken seriously enough that, for example, two high-level, highly respected, retired military officers—one of them very well known, Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl—actually went to the extent of writing an open letter to General (Mark) Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reminding him of his constitutional duties to send in the American military to remove the President from office if he refuses to leave.

There’s a long article, which you’ve probably seen, by Barton Gellman, reviewing the strategies that Republican leadership is thinking of to try and undermine the election. There has been plenty of tampering before. We’re not unfamiliar with that. In fact, one case that comes to mind is kind of relevant at the moment: 1960. Richard Nixon had pretty good reason to believe that he had won the election. Nixon, who was not the most delightful person in the history of Presidential politics, decided to put the welfare of the country over his personal ambition. That’s not what we’re seeing now, and that’s only one sign of a very significant change. The executive has been almost totally purged of any critical independent voices—nothing left but sycophants. If they’re not sufficiently loyal to the master, fire them and get someone else. A striking example recently was the firing of the inspectors general when they started looking into the incredible swamp Trump created in Washington. This kind of thing goes on and on.

Ten Years After Howard Zinn’s Death — Lessons from the People’s Historian

---

Missing Zinn
On the tenth anniversary of radical historian Howard Zinn’s death, Cornel West opens up about their friendship and what Zinn would have made of the decade—including whether he would have voted for Bernie.

Trump’s “Economic Boom” Is a Sham

Whatever one thinks of Trump, he is a highly skilled politician, with a good sense of how to gain popular approval, even virtual worship in some circles. His job approval just passed 50 percent for the first time, according to the latest Zogby poll.

He certainly has taken control of the GOP, to quite a remarkable extent. He’s been very successful with his two constituencies: the primary one, wealth and corporate power; and the voting base, relatively affluent fairly generally, including a large bloc of Christian evangelicals, rural whites, farmers, workers who have faith in his promises to bring back jobs, and a collection of others, some not too admirable.

It’s clear why the primary constituency is mostly delighted. Corporate profits are booming. Wealth continues to be concentrated in very few hands. Trump’s administration is lavishing them with gifts, including the tax bill, the main legislative achievement, across-the-board deregulation, and rapidly increasing fossil fuel production. He and McConnell — in many ways the evil genius of the administration — are packing the judiciary with reactionaries, guaranteeing the interests of the corporate sector and private wealth even after these “glory days” are past. They don’t like his trade wars, which are causing disruption of global supply chains, but so far at least that’s outweighed by his dedicated service to their welfare.

To keep the rest in line is sometimes easy, among them the Christian right, white supremacists, ultranationalists and xenophobes, and those in terror of “hordes” of immigrants. It is easy to throw them occasional chunks of red meat. But sometimes maintaining their allegiance takes the kind of demagoguery at which he is expert. Thus many who are understandably aggrieved by the economic policies of the neoliberal years still seem to feel that he’s the one person standing up for them by shaking his fist at those they blame for taking away their jobs: immigrants and “the scheming Chinese,” primarily.

Numerous press reports reveal how the scam works. Thus, in The New York Times, Patricia Cohen investigates the attitude of owners of large farms to Trump’s trade wars, which sharply cut their exports to China and cause severe financial hardships. In general, she finds, they continue to support the president. “I get why he’s doing it,” her major informant says: “America has been bullied” by China. And if the trade war persists through the 2020 election, “I would be OK with that.” He’s sure that Trump will do everything possible to help. Furthermore, “It makes me feel really good to hear Trump say farmers are important to this country. That’s what makes me want to stick with the president.”

Shaking a fist at the “Yellow Peril” and a little sweet talk carry the day, helped by $16 billion to compensate for export losses.

The gift is largely paid by a new hidden tax on the general public. Tariffs are in effect a tax on consumers (contrary to Trump’s pretenses about China paying for them). The New York Fed estimates the cost to consumers at $1.6 billion annually, a tax of $831 for the average American household. Hence Trump’s tariffs tax the general public to maintain the loyalty of a prime constituency. (...)

The Business Class Wants You to Hate the Government Because It Has a Defect

 R_P wrote: 
i don't suppose you know anyone who may have grabbed a copy... 

 miamizsun wrote: 
I guess so.